Meeting: talking debugger with Jocelyn at ETH

Revision as of 08:10, 13 December 2007 by Arnofiva (Talk | contribs) (Meetings)

This page is to plan the agenda for the meeting we plan to have with Jocelyn when he visits ETH in Zurich.

Involved parties:

  • Jocelyn
  • Bertrand
  • Andreas
  • Stefan
  • Arno

Organisation

  • To be confirmed soon

Date

  • arrival: tuesday 18th of December, Zurich HB either at 13h56 or 12h56
  • departure: wednesday around 14h..
  • tuesday night, hotel, or hosted by ETH people (but not in the streets)

Meetings

  • tuesday: 14:00 -> 15:00 .. about build process, ...
  • tuesday: 15:00 -> ... : debugger related points
  • wednesday: morning: continuation of debugger related points
  • wednesday: afternoon .. Jocelyn will be on train, and ETH can do a final meeting to "compute" all the information ;)


References:

Please complete the following list with your items:

  • General dicussion about the CDD idea
    • Where should it go?
    • What are the biggest obstacles?
    • CDD debuggers needs
      • How to best do fg debuging of test cases
      • How to best do bg extraction of test cases
        • Is our approach of using the debugger in console mode the right one?
Jocelyn: For now, there is GUI debugger, TTY debugger, and I guess CDD debugger, but you are not obliged to be in "console" mode
Andreas: The CDD test case extractor must be given an extractor (it doesn't care whether it gets the gui one or the console one). 
one can imagine a HTTP debugger, or even a silent debugger
        • Is it okay to retrieve the whole application state through ABSTRACT_DEBUG_VALUE's? Seems to become really slow with big applications.
      • Console debugger crashes (Arno can you provide details please)
        • TTY debugger seems to have problems when exception in infix features occurs -> not possible to use tty menu anymore
        • Sometimes combination of other tty functions (e.g. displaying all classes in system)
Jocelyn: TTY debugger is not perfect (not enough time to work on it), what should be done is
1) change the "menu like control" by a "shell like control"
2) having the debugger controller in a separate thread, this way we could support "interrupt" and so on
3) ... many improvement, and support all the debugger functionality
  • ok, then do it :-). No, seriously, the question is if and how we can improve the tty debugger just to enable system level tests for our cdd
    • Console Menu (again Arno)
      • Multiple debuggers at the same time (large long term issue)
Jocelyn: That might be possible, but this won't be that easy for now, however, I have been changing progressively the design to be more flexible, and to allow that in the future. Maybe ISE could plan this for 6.3 with other major design changes.
      • Prestate capturing
        • How can we use the debugger for it
          • old values
          • invariants
        • How can we use ES capture and "Review" for it?
    • Build system needs
      • How to do it properly on Windows? (Stefan, please provide details here)
      • (by Stefan) well, i am getting used to it. The problems with the updated build scripts is that they might not be compatible with 6.0, which cdd is based on? (i admit i did not try)
Jocelyn: Those days, I am integrating+updating works from es-make team (Bernd and others) into the trunk, this way it should be much more easier to build the EiffelStudio tools. Still in progress.
    • Guided tour through debugger
    • Guided tour through build system
    • Unable to debug ES with ES (only Stefan and Andreas). Maybe Jocelyn can have a quick look.
    • Capture and Replay
      • Compare ES Capture and Replay and Sel. Capture and Replay
Jocelyn: ES provides "Execution Recording and Replay", or should I say "Review"
      • What are strengths and weaknesses?
      • Can approaches be combined for mutal benefit?
      • Where to go from here?